I can’t quite count the number of times someone in the marketing world has told me that they won’t use Twitter to promote their brand. They’ll come up with a million reasons why they don’t like the service or the brands that still use. They argue that they’ve fallen out of love with the social platform, that they can’t find their voice within it, and that they can’t connect to it the way they can with Instagram. These people love to tear down the service for it’s humour-driven content, for its lack of visual clarity and for the confusing under-segregation of personal and business users.
Whilst I will readily admit that Twitter definitely does have its flaws, I will always be the first to support adopting the platform for commercial promotion.
So why should my brand use it?
Firstly, depending on how you value your metrics of brand awareness, Twitter can be one of the best platforms to share links to your sites and products. Where Instagram carries its own set of problems when it comes to link sharing, Twitter has no such problems and is a great service for producing follow-through links from users. If you were to track how many users are reaching your site from Instagram vs how many are landing on your page from Twitter, you might be a little surprised.
The capacity for sharable content is also another huge advantage for Twitter, as it allows users to easily and effectively share their work and message with new and untapped audiences on the site. One simple retweet and a post about your new line can be seen and appreciated by thousands of users, reaching an entirely new demographic for your brand. Twitter is also one of the easiest and most creative platforms for brand marketing, as it has the capacity for not just image-based content but also video content, gifs and audio content. This allows users to utilise a variety of marketing tools to help promote their business or brand, giving them the freedom to showcase their diverse portfolio of marketing content. With so many studies citing that consumers respond better to visually diverse content, Twitter, therefore, opens up a number of exciting and innovative avenues for new ways of marketing.
So how should my brand use Twitter?
There a number of creative ways to make use of Twitter-specific content to help advertise and raise awareness of your brand. From designing unique, high-quality assets to retweeting entertaining and subtle advertising videos, Twitter allows for a constant stream of engagement with your consumers. With easy ways to reply to users, Twitter is often used as a vital customer complaints tool – or a method with which to correspond to users directly and informally.
Joining in with the latest digital trends, targeting audiences with paid advertisements and running virtual campaigns can help to elevate your brand, without sacrificing your visual aesthetic. One of the most underappreciated elements is its capacity to maintain a visual identity for users. Through varied imagery, emoji use, photography and even the colour of the profile itself their brand aesthetic can easily be translated to your audience. The exact colour palette of your branding can be used consistently throughout your profile, with images to match, synchronising with those on your Instagram feed. Every post you share on Instagram can be shared on Twitter, yet with more detail, more information, more links and easier engagement with comments and retweets.
Twitter is only as good as its user, and if you know how to use it well – it can truly become the gem of your digital marketing campaign.
